Bio

J. Mark Bertrand is the author of Back on Murder, Pattern of Wounds, and the forthcoming Nothing to Hide, crime novels featuring Houston homicide detective Roland March. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston and lived in the city for fifteen years. After one hurricane too many, he and his wife moved to South Dakota. Mark has been arrested for a crime he didn't commit, was the foreman of a hung jury in Houston, and after relocating served on the jury that acquitted Vinnie Jones of assault. In 1972, he won an honorable mention in a child modeling contest, but pursued writing instead.

March 2008

March 19, 2008

Back in February, Paul Luedtke, a doctoral student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School reviewed Rethinking Worldview for The Portable Seminary. He writes: "...Re-thinking Worldview remains an important book and deserves a serious read because Bertrand’s approach is fresh, informed, and anchored in a global context." I particularly appreciate this observation:

"This book is of particular interest to those trying to understand, and engage the culture that surrounds them. In view of the current 'culture wars', where Evangelicals often see culture as something to either battle against or be isolated from, the author shows how correctly understanding a Biblical worldview and 'asking worldview questions' can be 'a way to open up the culture to deeper scrutiny. It ought to provide a fuller, richer experience of the world around us.'"

He does take me to task for not demonstrating why correspondence, coherence and productivity are good tests for the validity of a worldview, and he found the alliteration (worldview, wisdom, witness) forced. My response? You may have a point.

I should take this opportunity to point out what a great resource The Portable Seminary is. If you want to take your theological education further, it's an excellent starting point.

March 06, 2008

Last week, I recorded an interview about Rethinking Worldview with Pilgrim Radio's Bill Feltner, and it's running today at 2 AM, 12 PM and 9 PM Pacific Time. You can listen live by following this link and clicking on "Listen Now":

JMB: Bad advice is always the best. I've learned the most from being told what not to do, from studying bad examples. In writing, there is rarely just one way to solve a problem. Good examples can be imitated, but too much imitation leads to staleness. T. S. Eliot once wrote that, although they believe themselves to be individuals pursuing their own agendas, contemporary authors inevitably work as a group, pushing in the same direction. All those good examples are a way to tap into the spirit of the age, I suspect. Only in time do the real individuals emerge, and they turn out to have been bucking the trend. They're revolutionaries, or in the case of novelists, reactionaries, and I can't help thinking they were probably nurtured on bad examples, as focused on what they were determined not to be as they were on being.

Best advice? Be rigorously honest about the world. Write until you finish, and then edit. Revise. Write about what you love, even if no one pays to read it. When you write, don't bother about current trends or what's relevant or what's selling. Finish, and then worry about the business. Above all, finish.

Books by Bertrand

J. Mark Bertrand: Nothing to HideThe third book in the series takes March into the world of the paranoid conspiracy thriller: a headless corpse, the Mexican cartels, gun runners, and an ex-spook obsessed with Dante.

J. Mark Bertrand: Pattern of WoundsIn his second outing, March hunts a vicious killer while trying to keep a decade-old conviction from falling apart. A compulsively readable follow-up that Publisher's Weekly calls "gritty and chilling."

Book Description

Everybody has a worldview, a perspective on life, and sometimes we're forced to re-think. The world can surprise and overwhelm us, and when that happens, it helps to know what's really important in life. Rethinking Worldview explores some essential questions from a Christian perspective, starting with what "worldviews" really are, how they are formed and how they change. It's a chronicle of one man's intellectual journey, written to encourage fellow travelers along the way.